Pomp and circumstances

This is a tough year to be a graduation speaker.

Giving a talk to the Class of Whenever is generally a pretty straight-up Dale Carnegie kind of gig. Lead off with some general congratulations, follow with a few Pollyanna platitudes and finish up with a rousing collection of clichés and you’ve pretty much got the job done. Little is expected, and generally, less attention is paid.

Don’t worry about the message, just don’t rain on the parade…

This year, though, is a bit different. It’s not rain that’s putting a damper on high school commencement ceremonies around the country; it’s the hail of bullets that has punctuated the school day in classrooms across the country. Thinking of death is a real downer, and requiring graduates, their parents, families, friends and teachers pass through metal detectors as armed guards keep pace with Pomp and Circumstance is a sharp reminder of  the fact that this year more American kids have been killed in their classrooms than American soldiers in combat zones.

Add to that a toxic political stew that’s soured public life from Washington to City Hall; ever deepening divides over race, religion and culture, and threats to the environment that cast a dark shadow over everyone’s future.

It’s a year when even Dr. Seuss would have a hard time prescribing optimism.

Still…

The last annual performance for our high school choir was to provide musical interludes for graduation. Fifty years ago I was finishing up my sophomore year, sill singing second tenor with a voice dropping toward bass. Sitting robed and sweaty as the seniors became alumni and my own walk across the stage into adulthood loomed an imaginable two years ahead of me, what I was feeling was something pretty close to fear.

For me, 1968 wasn’t turning out to be a very good year. I suppose I could blame it on Mrs. Simon, my speech and debate coach. She insisted we keep up with the news, read long articles on arcane political and social issues, and generally be aware of what was happening in the world beyond the confines of the Root River Conference and the bars in La Crosse that turned a blind eye to underage patrons.

So that night I was very aware that life in 1968 America … even in Caledonia, Minnesota … was not the stuff of a happy talk graduation speech.

It was an unsettling time. It seemed the country was slipping into a whole array of gaps – the Generation Gap, hippies and free love versus the Establishment and the Silent Majority. A president and administration whose pronouncements and positions strayed ever farther from what appeared to be the truth created a Credibility Gap that turned the political process toxic, and reduced much of civil discourse to chants of “Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?”

It was a time of blood, and threats of more blood. With riots sweeping city after city it appeared that the assassin’s bullet had killed Martin Luther King’s dream as surely as it had ended his life. Gunshots in Dallas were still fresh in our memory, and the last of the graduation cake would still be uneaten when yet another gunman would claim the life of another Kennedy, again reopening the nation’s wounds.

We were a wounded nation. In Vietnam, where the Tet bloodletting extinguished any light at the end of any tunnel we could imagine, the daily death toll continued. We could only wonder, who among us would it claim?

And war beckoned elsewhere as well. An American spyship, the Pueblo, was tied to a North Korean dock, one of its crew dead, the rest imprisoned after being seized at sea. Israel still occupied the Arab lands conquered the year before. The Red Guard rampaged through China and the Soviet finger was never far from the nuclear trigger.

It was no time for happy talk. But half a century later, we’re still here. Not a great deal better, perhaps, but neither a great deal worse.

There’s small comfort in that, but comfort nonetheless.

And a bit of hope.